Gardner McKay: Dashing Overachiever

Gardner McKay wasthe antithesis of the fame–hungry ’sleb that contemporary culture knows so well. He spurned heartthrobstatus for a life of adventure, literary achievement and existential restlessness…

Gardner McKay driving in his Chevrolet convertible as his shaggy dog enjoys the ride, 1959. Photograph by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

The issue of Life magazine that hit
the newsstands on July 6, 1959 bore the image of an
almost excruciatingly handsome man, then 27 years old, staring into
the middle distance: dash-of-salt, tousled hair; lips puckered
rakishly; eyes fixed in a gentle squint towards some unseen object
of conquest (a cricketing nemesis’s middle stump, one might
assume, given the raised right arm and cream V-neck sweater, were
the man in question to hail from the other side of the
Atlantic).

A strap at the bottom of the cover referred to this
enigmatic Adonis as “actor, athlete, artist”, which now
comes across as a rather cursory summary. Had the cover been
published in the latter stages of Gardner McKay’s life,
the magazine may have needed to accommodate other
accomplishments, including sailor, basketball star, diver,
fisherman, model, sculptor, theatre critic, photographer, and,
improbably enough,
agronomist’s assistant.

The cover line at the top of Life’s
front page reads, “How about him, girls?”, and the
feature inside exclaims: “This is the face that will launch a
million sighs and burn its romantic image into the hearts of hordes
of American females.” But while the girls would have been
reaching for the smelling salts, it’s possible it was the
boys in post-war America who felt more curious about the life of
such a man. Indeed, when you get to turn down Marilyn Monroe’s
personal appeals to become her co-star, and when your memories
weave such a rich narrative that they scarcely seem
plausible — as was the case with Gardner McCay’s
unfinished Journey Without a Map, written as he
succumbed to prostate cancer in 2001 at the age of
69 — you can relax in the knowledge that you’ve lived
life to the full.

McKay became a household name thanks
to his starring role in the television
series Adventures
in Paradise, based
loosely on James Michener’s Pacific Ocean-based yarns, which
ran from 1959 to 1962 and in which McKay starred as a skipper
of aschoonerthat plied the South Pacific in
search of improbable adventures. In a sane world, that show would
be but a furtive, small-print disclosure on his CV. The
great-grandson of the shipbuilder Donald McKay, McKay was born
George Cadogan Gardner McKay into a wealthy
Episcopalian family in New York
City, but brought up between there and Paris
(between the ages of four and 17 he crossed the Atlantic eight
times and stayed in 13 different boardingschools).

He worked briefly as a sculptor during his studies at Cornell
University, and also worked as a movie-critic for
the Cornell Daily Sun and the campus
magazine The Widow, plus various articles for yacht
magazines. Moving back to New York, he took up
sculpture (he had one piece displayed in the Museum of
Modern Art) while living in modest bliss in Greenwich Village
and enhancing his credentials as a polymath by
doing extra work as a designer, artist, record covers
illustrator and painter.

Then came a brush with the more peculiar extremities of chaos
theory. Having been offered a modelling job in Paris in 1956, a
series of photographs with the model Suzy Parker, McKay
took a ship to Europe that encountered the stricken
Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria, which had, in dense fog,
been struck by the Swedish cruise liner M.S. Stockholm off the
coast of Nantucket. Lesser mortals might have looked on in horror
as 51 passengers went to a watery grave: McKay scrambled onto a
lifeboat and took photographs of the sinking
liner that ended up being published in The New
York Times, Life and many other global
titles.

It was in far more tranquil circumstances — he was
minding his own business, reading poetry in a Hollywood coffee
shop — that McKay was spotted by Adventures in
Paradise co-producer Dominick Dunne, and invited to take a
screen test. He’d already had small roles in feature movies
Raintree Country and Holiday for Lovers, but this
chance meeting would lead to
television colouring the next chapter of his
life.

“Gardner was a classy guy — good goods, as they used
to say,” was how Dunne described his meeting with the
six-foot-five McKay, and their serendipitous encounter (it helped
that McKay could sail, having whiled away many a pleasant hour
marshalling his own 19-footer sailing boat, China Boy, in the
Long Island waters as a teenager) led to him taking the lead
role.

It was his matinee-idol looks, rather than thespian
prowess, that carried him through the gig: in an early review, one
critic mentioned that McKay played his role “in one
emotion”. But in his defence, his heart wasn’t in it, and
his relationship with celebrity might best be described
as unidirectional. Jean Doumanian, his film producer
and friend, later said: “He hated the fact he was known for
that television series. It was not the professional or private path
he wanted to take.”

McKay was just as unequivocal on the matter: “Fame is so
cheap that I wanted to go someplace where someone, some stranger,
might be able to make up his own mind about me without already
having formed an opinion based on drivel that needed to be overcome
or ignored,” he wrote in Journey Without a
Map. That place turned out to be (after another stint
in France, where reruns of Adventures in
Paradise had made him a sensation) the
Sahara desert, where he rode from the Red Sea to the Atlantic
coast with the Egyptian camel corps.

Perhaps creatively galvanised by a prolonged spell in
a vast void the size of the U.S., McKay returned to his country of
birth and began living by the pen, writing plays including the
well-received Sea Marks, and several novels. One of his
last, the thriller Toyer, about a twisted playboy who
inflicts psychological torture on his victims then sends them into
a drug-induced coma, is no beach read, but it became
a bestseller. Many of his shorter writings won critical plaudits
(his play Sea Marks won a writing gong from the
Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle).

The lust for rarefied experiences never dimmed, despite crewing
on yachts in the Caribbean and hiking through the jungles of the
Amazon. Even in the relatively settled period of his
life, living in Beverly Hills, serving as drama critic and
theatre editor for
the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and
teaching playwriting at U.C.L.A., his yen for the spicier life
prevailed. (“Gardner had a passion for lions and cheetahs, and
actually had pet cheetahs at his place in Beverly Hills until
his neighbours complained,” his
friend, the actor Colby Chester,
recalled.)

Some light into McKay’s extraordinary psyche is shone by a
comment he made to People magazine in
1999. “I never knew what I was searching for,” he
said, “only what I was not searching for. My life is
defined by what I’ve quit.” While his life narrative
offers us only glimpses of what made the man tick, it
offers some edifying insights into a bygone era. Here in
2018 — especially if you’ve mistakenly flicked
through the latest Freeview offerings in a bored
after-dinner moment — the story of a dashing young man
who spurned cheap fame for rich adventure and artistic
accomplishment makes one feel not only vigorous
admiration for that individual but for the values of an era that
was culturally more edifying.